New year, new puppet videos

Once again I failed at getting the December release from Death By Puppets shared in a timely manner, so once again you get a twofer puppet video post. For me there has been a journey in both the craft of making the puppets (though I think most of the improvements have come in the interior construction making them easier to use) and the performance of them.

Doing both these videos and live puppet slams has forced us to develop puppetry skills in two directions: film and live. Film puppetry is a very different skill set than live puppetry. Because you’re able to edit the footage you don’t have to have all the lines down for one long take. The flip side is that because you’re playing very close to the audience/camera there is much less room for sloppy movement/lip-sync.

For the December Death By Puppets video we had the opportunity to film in a local theatre and rather than use green screen we shot against their unfinished painted backgrounds for the play that was being rehearsed. I love the results. The mix of doing video puppetry in a theatrical setting was interesting, and the acoustics were nice enough we didn’t have to do any after the fact audio re-takes.

Our January release is one we filmed many months ago. It’s always interesting to me to see something we shot months ago to see how far, hopefully, we’ve come in technique and puppetry skills.